The application of mobile phones increases as the technology advances further. Today, a mobile phone becomes an indispensable communication device in our daily life. The GPS (Global Positioning System) technology is applied in driving vehicles, touring and sport activities in order to locate the desired destination in addition to its commercial and military uses.
Nowadays, the GPS receiver is usually coupled to a portable hand-held device, such as a mobile phone, a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) or a navigation device in order to assist the user to obtain the surrounding maps for locating a desired position and other information, thereby economizing the time for reaching the desired destination.
Since the hand-held device, for coupling to the GPS receiver, is required to store an abundant of data (or maps) in addition its own operation system, a plurality of expansion slots are to be prepared for receiving the different memory cards holding different information. Under this condition, the user can replace any suitable memory card at different environment in order to achieve the desired object.
The electronic devices are produced more and more compact as days go by. How to plan out the design for different electronic components within the limited space becomes an urgent task to be deal with. Presently, a SD (Secure Digital Flash Memory) card is used for storing the map data, and has a dimension of 24 mm×32 mm×2.1 mm. The width of the expansion slot for receiving the SD card should be greater than the thickness of the SD card. Under this condition, a relatively great difficult is encountered when designing a mobile phone of compact dimension.
A more compact NAND card has been proposed to replace the SD card, because the former has more storage capacity when compared to the latter. The manufacturers in the related field have invented a compact NAND card that can be soldered directly on the circuit board of the hand-held device. The dimension of the expansion slot can be reduced to half for seating such NAND card, thereby saving a great amount of room. Due to large storage capacity of the NAND card, the hand-held device does not need optional slots, which, in turn, results in lesser manufacturing cost.
Note that it is time consuming for burning the operation system of the SD or NAND card, or the map data in a burning apparatus. For instance, a burning device in a PC can burn only one piece of NAND card at one time. For the NAND card of 1G storage capacity, a time period of 20 minutes is required for burning data therein. Therefore, for mass production of the NAND cards, the process is time consuming and results in high manufacturing expense.
A chip burner has been invented in order to burn a plurality of flash NAND cards at the same time so as to avoid the occurrence of time-consuming and high manufacturing expense.
FIG. 1A shows a prior art chip burner and includes a circuit board 10, a flexible cable 12 and a transit plate 14. The circuit board 10 is capable of receiving a flash card 2. The flexible cable 12 has two opposite terminals interconnected to the circuit board 10 and the transit plate 14 respectively. The transit plate 14 can be inserted into the server 3 in order to burn the data within the serve 3 to the flash card 2.
As illustrated in FIG. 1B, the circuit board 10 further includes a socket 101 and a set of coupling pins 103. When the retainer 102 is pressed outward, the flash card 2 can be inserted into the socket 101. The retainer 102 retrieves to its initial position upon release of the pressing force so as to retain the flash card 2 securely within the socket 101. The circuit board 10 also has circuit paths for establishing electrical communication between the flash card 2 and the server 3 once the coupling pins 103 are inserted into the transit plate 14.
As best shown in FIG. 1C, the circuit board 10 can be formed with a plurality of sockets 101 for receiving a plurality of the flash cards respectively. For insertion, the respective socket 51 is pressed manually in order to repel the retainers 102 away from the socket 101 prior to inserting each flash card into a respective socket 101. Manually pressing the socket 101 is laborious and time consuming. The force exerted by the hand cannot always produce the same magnitude, thereby tending to ruin of the socket 101 and the retainers 102 or else the flash cards 2 are not retained securely within the sockets 101. Thus, the flash cards may wobble during the burning operation and can provide unstable burning efficiency.